Enterprise mobility has revolutionized end user computing, enabling users to access business data at any time and from any location. It has increased productivity, provided field workers with Internet access, and accelerated the pace of digital transformation. However, it has also impacted how organizations deploy, manage, and secure enterprise applications. As a result of the changes generated by mobility, information technology (IT) administrators need to develop new ways to support a diverse array of devices, such as tablets and phones. Further, there is a need to find new ways to provision software and to protect end user devices, while yielding control to the employees who purchased their own devices.
Due to security and management challenges introduced by mobile devices, Virtual Mobile Infrastructure (VMI) has emerged. VMI allows organizations to host Android apps on servers in a data center or cloud environment and allows users to securely access the apps from their own phone or tablet. VMI is similar to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), except the instead of virtualizing a traditional Windows or Linux desktop operating system, VMI virtualizes a mobile operating system, such as Android. VMI enables organizations to develop apps once and support any mobile device, centralize mobile app management, monitor user activity for unauthorized access or data exfiltration, and enforce strong authentication and encryption.
A problem in existing VMI architectures is they support only one user per mobile OS instance. Therefore, this approach does not provide adequate scalability or performance required to support thousands or tens of thousands of concurrent users due to the extreme computing resource demands of the VMI architecture. The expense to host a unique Android VM or LXC Container for every user in the cloud (OS virtualization) would be excessive. This is because most cloud providers charge for every VM instance. Large VMs with bigger RAM resources are also prohibitively expensive. If an organization has one thousand concurrent users, they would need to pay for a large number of VMs. Managing VMs in a corporate data center would be equally expensive; organizations would incur higher IT management and capital costs. In addition, hosting a separate VM per user would necessitate high performance storage hardware, similar to what VDI customers must purchase today. A better approach is needed.